A CONVERSATION WITH ERROL BUDDLE by Mike McKeon*

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[The following results from Mike McKeon’s initial interview with Errol Buddle in Sydney in December, 2011 and subsequent Skype conversations and phone calls which were completed in April, 2012. This piece was published in Jazzline, the official publication of the Victorian Club, Vol 45, No 1, Autumn 2012.]

The great saxophonist Errol Buddle…

Mike McKeon: It’s great to meet you at last Errol. It is very kind of you to give us the time to hear about your musical career as one of the most talented ‘doublers’ in Australian music ‘royalty’ along with Don Burrows amongst others. Many people may not know of your exploits - perhaps because you were in America for some years. It was here though that the Quartet/Quintet [AJQ] became one of the five most popular jazz groups in all America for some years. Could we start with where were you born?

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* Mike [AKA Mick] McKeon started playing clarinet and later from age 16. He co-founded The Beavers big band with Glasgow visitor Albert Higgins which launched a number of well-known pro Melbourne musicians. He worked on Nauru Is for three years, then sailed single-handed around the Pacific for a few years returning to music in the late 70’s. Recently he has run the Let’s Dance Big Band and plays in a number of small groups. He took on the editorship for four years of the Victorian Jazz Club’s newsletter and then the magazine Jazzline. He interviewed Don Burrows in April 2010, with video filming by Lois and Fred Stephenson, and Errol Buddle in December 2011 for the magazine.

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Errol Buddle: In Reynella, a small town near Adelaide, 1928 on the 29th of April which also happens to be ’s birthday.

Mike: Your mother arranged that no doubt? And was the family musical?

Errol: No not really, my mother worked as a maid on the estate of Mr John Reynell who created the famous Reynella Wines and didn’t play anything. I heard that my father played the piano in a church in Clarendon as a teenager and we had a piano in the house but he never touched it and I didn’t know he could play it. He didn’t have much interest in music and I think he only ever heard me play once that I know of when he came to a concert late in his life. Dad joined the Royal Australian Flying Corps [the forerunner of the RAAF] in 1917. He was sent to Egypt and stationed in Cairo where he flew bi-plane Sopwith Camels. They used to back up Lawrence of Arabia in bombing raids on Turkish trains etc. However he was discharged because he was racing a train one day and hit a telegraph pole when flying low and pranged the plane and broke his leg and other injuries. I still have his khaki uniform with wings on it.

He brought back a lot of beautiful photos of Cairo and others of planes crashed into the desert. Historical stuff. Apparently I used to enjoy the buskers when I was around five years old - they said I used to jog up and down to the music; this was of course during the Depression years. My mother said that one day she saw a busker pack up his stuff, walk around the corner and get into a brand new Chevrolet!

Mike: Did you have brothers or sisters?

One of the earliest shots of Don Burrows (centre, on clarinet) then aged about 16 years old, with Wally Norman (left, on trumpet) with Al Vincer (right, on vibes)…

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Errol: No, there were lots of cousins but I was the only one in our family.

Mike: You were like Don Burrows then, the only one. Did you get into music like Don by listening to the radio?

Errol: No, Don got interested in music at a younger age than I did. I unfortunately didn’t know jazz existed until I was around 16. I had obviously heard jazz in movies etc - I would have heard Harry James, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey in films - but it never really registered with me. When I was a student at the Adelaide College of Music I went to a jazz concert one night in Adelaide to hear some former students such as Bobby Limb [later well known as a variety show entertainer and host on TV - Ed.] and Syd Beckwith, a great alto player who eventually went to Canada – I just

Bobby Limb: Errol can still remember some of the phrases that Bobby played… went to hear them play and I was absolutely ‘knocked out’, this turned me onto jazz for the first time . It hit me like a bombshell. I still remember some of the phrases that Bobby played, they really got to me so I went home that night and turned on the radio and found jazz on late night ABC – and listened to Fats Waller and all those great players. I was so taken with the tenor and the way Bobby played that later on when I got an alto I used to play solos in the bottom register to sound like a tenor.

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Mike: Now from the Best of Buddles Doubles CD cover there is a photo of you with a ‘curved’ soprano sax at eight years old, was that your first instrument?

Errol: No, about a year before that my mother used to listen to a weekly program on the radio by the Adelaide Banjo Club and she thought it would nice for me to play the banjo mandolin so she enrolled me into the club and I started to play that and I was also playing the metal Fife in the school band at this time. Then one day after several months Mr John Ellerton Becker the head of the music school – who later became Sir John Becker – said to some of the banjo students including Bobby Limb who was four years older than me – “I am getting 11 brand new saxophones from the United States and if any of your parents would like you to play one of these then I’ll tell them how much they are and we’ll start you on the ”. This is in the middle of the depression! So several of us students went along and there around this room were all these open saxophone cases.

John Ellerton Becker: he brought in 11 brand new saxophones from the United States…

Mike: It must have been magic – like kids in a toy shop!

Errol: Well they were American Conns which are much in demand today. I saw the big one, the bass sax. That’s what I wanted to play!

Mike: A bass sax even then?

Errol: Yes, two sopranos, four altos, two tenors, two baritones and the bass sax which of course I wasn’t big enough to play so I finished up with a soprano sax. I was the youngest in the band so I got the smallest instrument.

Mike: Was it the ‘curved’ soprano or the straight one?

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Errol: It was the straight one at first, then the teacher got some ‘curved’ ones as they were much easier to hold for an eight year old. Anyway at that school, which he named the Adelaide College of Music, he formed Drum and Fife Bands, a Drum and Bugle Corp and a great big concert or military band as they were known in those days. There were about 90 kids playing in it. I can’t remember how many instruments there were but something like ten sousaphones, 22 clarinets, 16 saxophones, a couple of oboes and bassoons, several flutes and piccolos, alto flutes, trumpets, trombones, flugelhorns etc. And every year he’d put on an extravaganza concert called On Parade at the Tivoli Theatre for seven nights with the whole school. The stage was tiered for the concert band with the 10 sousaphones across the back in a row - a master-piece of production.

Mike: That sounds marvellous, nothing like it then?

Errol: Or now.

Mike: Did your folks have to buy the instrument?

Errol, aged eight, with his curved Conn soprano sax…

Errol: Oh yes, it cost around £40 – probably around eight or more weeks’ wages. About six months from when we got the saxes we were booked into the Prince Edward theatre in Sydney to play on stage in between movies – the main movie was The General Died At Dawn with Gary Cooper. We learned several arrangements and we really practiced a lot with this eleven saxophone band, so much so that I got quite bored with it. One section in The Teddy Bears Picnic was just a repetitive four-note

5 to the bar phrase and I got so bored I just faked playing it. All up Mr Becker took the eleven-member saxophone band and the Drum and Fife band of around 200 kids to Sydney by train in January for a week in 1937 playing seven nights, then back to Adelaide of course.

Mike: Now we are getting near the end of your Primary School years, what tutors did you have?

Errol: I had a private lesson on Saturday morning with Les Mitchell the lead alto at the Palais Royal [a big ballroom in Adelaide], and on another night a class lesson. Les was more of a classical player so he didn’t teach us how to play Jazz, just how to play the sax naturally.

Mike: Was this a public school?

Errol: No, a private one. The school issued ‘practice cards’ and the pupils had to note the time spent on the instrument each day. Mr Becker had the best teachers in Adelaide working for him and some came from the Adelaide Symphony for flute, bassoon, oboe, but he didn’t have any strings. Every year he would hold a music camp up in the Adelaide Hills for about a week where there was a swimming pool and tennis courts etc. We all went up there by bus and we would play during the day in a big tent. I don’t think there was a music school like it anywhere. And every year they’d have a soirée at Myer’s department store and if he wanted to have a march down the main street of Adelaide which he did a few times, he’d get permission and off we’d go. Oh and another prominent Adelaide sax player at the College who doubled was Bill MacKinnon. [3 years older than Errol – Ed.]. When I was 11 or 12

The clarinetist Barney Bigard: Errol heard his (and Ellington’s) Mood Indigo around 1936…PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

6 there was a stage band in the College that I couldn’t get into because I only played soprano, but I heard this tune being played at a rehearsal that really got to me more than anything I had ever heard - it was Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard’s Mood Indigo that I think became popular around 1936. So perhaps even then I might have had an inclination towards jazz without as yet knowing it.

Mike: And you could have played that tune on soprano. Now you went to secondary school?

Errol: Yes, to Adelaide High School. There were state-wide exams at the end of 3rd year high school and I came 21st in the state and was awarded a bursary which covered all expenses from then on. I still continued going to the College of Music but with reduced music lessons – one private one per week. On Saturday afternoons we still had the military band rehearsals for a couple of hours but in response to all the kids complaining that they were missing the Saturday arvo matinee movies Mr Becker brought along a projector and started showing movies halfway through the rehearsal.

Mike: He must have been a wonderful person, so dedicated and enthusiastic.

Errol: He was. He could charm anybody, sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. He was later knighted for his efforts in improving the fertility of the soil in the south east of South Australia. He went on later to retire in the Bahamas, I don’t know why, a tax haven or what, but it was certainly nearer Europe and the USA.

Mike: I would encourage readers to ‘Google’ the web and read of this very interesting gentleman. Now in your secondary years did you move onto other instruments?

Errol: Not at first, I was still on soprano. But then some old friends of the family started a weekly dance at Reynella - Mrs Jones, as I had known her, played Mandolin and her son Martin played Shefte ‘style’ piano [the Shefte method was a very popular ‘quick’ way to learn the piano then, Ed.] and she managed to get us a regular Saturday gig at a tiny abandoned church hall. So for that I obtained an alto then as it was more suitable – but we all played melody at the same time, I wish I had a recording of it now! We played the popular tunes of the day and to tell you the truth I don’t think I have enjoyed playing any better than I did then! That’s probably where I learned to play and interpret melodies.

Mike: Was that off ‘dots’?

Errol: Initially off ‘dots’ but then we memorised it and this gave me a lot of practice with tone, vibrato and things like that. That went on for a while then we got a gig in a bigger hall in Morphett Vale and all the locals would come - you know, you could hardly see the band for the flowers across the front of the stage brought by the locals. It was really enjoyable. Then a boarder with Mrs Jones took on playing drums and joined in with us. I don’t know what it sounded like but we were enthusiastic anyway.

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It was an unusual way to start playing music, there was no guidance in playing jazz at that time.

I continued playing the country dances but when I had to do my high school intermediate exam, which was more serious than earlier ones, I decided to give away the dance every week because I had too much homework – I pretty well stopped playing then. The following year I was ready to play but now my friend Martin was doing his intermediate so he had to opt out of playing piano for his exams. We had a lot of homework in those days. By the second year of high school I decided I wanted to be an architect and I read books on architecture, such as the history of it etc. I was in the boy scouts at the time too and one day I went to the home of the Scout Master, who was an architect, and I was disappointed to see that his house was so small and humble and my uncle said, “in that game it’s not what you know it’s who you know that matters”, so I was discouraged from this and dropped the idea. Instead, I left school and got a job in a Bank at age 16 and stayed there a couple of years or so.

Work in the bank was so simple after high school maths because all we did was simple addition and there were no adding machines. We had to add long columns of figures in our head. During the first few months at the bank my mother saw 2 ads for sax players in ballroom bands and I auditioned unsuccessfully for them. At the second one the band leader asked if I was in the union and I said no. I didn’t really know anything about unions then anyway and he said “oh that’s good” but I still didn’t get the job! Now my mother saw an ad for a sax player at the King’s Ballroom – the instrumentation of the band was trumpet, alto, three rhythm and a singer and I got the job on alto. For this job I had to buy a clarinet so I bought one of the Boosey & Hawkes metal ones, I didn’t particularly want to play clarinet but as you know many charts have doubling on clarinet and by now I had sold the soprano sax.

After playing at Kings Ballroom, and later on some radio shows, I’d come in to work at the bank and deposit all this money from three radio shows and a couple of dances a week. More money than the bank manager was earning. Then I got word that I was going to be transferred out to the country and I didn’t want that. I figured I was earning more money than the manager so I might as well go with music full-time. My father wanted me to have an interest in mechanics because of his interest in cars - he was the first Essex car dealer in Adelaide. But that was not for me. At Kings Ballroom on one Sunday each month the Adelaide Jazz Lovers Society had a meeting and they’d play a whole lot of Jelly Roll Morton, Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman – hardly any of the then current players like Goodman or Shaw or Harry James etc. I liked it though. It was good and two of the prominent people of the Society were Kim Bonython and Clem Semmler who was a school teacher at the time. Clem eventually went on to become the deputy general manager of the ABC in Sydney [where he was instrumental in promoting jazz programming. Ed.].

There was a shortage of musicians at this time because of the war – one more year and I would have been in the war had it gone on. By now I had left the Kings Ballroom band and joined the Astoria Ballroom band on lead alto taking over from

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Syd Beckwith when he left for Canada. I always wanted to play tenor, so I sold the alto and Mum took me to Sydney where I bought a tenor sax. On return I found that Bobby Limb had left to join Bob Gibson’s band in Melbourne playing at Palm Grove in St Kilda. This was the best band in the country at the time and they did regular radio programs from the actual ballroom which I used to listen to. Bobby was doing three radio shows a week up till then and after he left I just stepped into his shoes. There was no one else to choose from as there were hardly musicians left in Adelaide. They were all at the war. So I got a job playing tenor in sextets at 5AD and 5KA. So as soon as I returned from Sydney I took over Bobby Limb’s work.

Two of the prominent people in the Adelaide Jazz Lovers Society were Kym Bonython (above) and Clem Semmler (below)…

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Mike: What was the brand of tenor then?

Errol: It was a Pan American model made by Conn and it was chrome plated. There was another bandleader in Adelaide from Europe named Evald Tondi who formed a big orchestra with strings, brass and saxes etc to perform one hour radio shows every week on 5DN called Stars of Industry. It was like a talent show with singers from the factories etc, and people who could play something. One week the soloist was Jack Brokensha. He had just got out of the Air Force. I’ve still got about four discs of recordings of that orchestra. Great big discs, about 2’6” diameter. This is what they used to record radio programs on then; very slow turning.

Mike: These would be very precious; wouldn’t it be good to have someone transfer them to modern media for the archives? Now you are going on 18, 19y/o?

Errol: Yes, I continued doing the ballroom and radio programs. Then I met up with a few young guys playing in Adelaide and we played lots of jam sessions together.

Mike: Were there local or overseas musos influencing you then?

Errol: Bobby Limb was the first one and I still think he had a great sound and a good style. He was a very good tenor player. I also started collecting records and if you wanted to get the latest you had to be at the shop by 9am on a Monday as that was the time the quota came in. My favourite tenor player at that time was Coleman Hawkins along with others like Lester Young of course, Vido Musso and Charlie Ventura etc. I also loved the playing of Johnny Hodges and Willie Smith on altos. I collected as many records as I could of big bands and small groups.

Coleman Hawkins: one of Errol’s favourite tenor players at that time … PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

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Mike: How did you get into jazz after hearing Bobby Limb play?

Errol: When I got home that night I turned on the ABC radio to find some jazz. In those days the ABC used to play quite a lot of ‘trad’ stuff and I liked it all. Then on the Saturday night dance gig with myself on alto, a trumpet and rhythm section they’d say, do a solo on Dinah, so I’d struggle through that. Then I got an offer from Dave Dallwitz to join his new Southern Jazz Group. This band contained some really authentic Dixielanders; one of the few authentic Dixieland bands in the country. In fact the very first gathering of the Southern Jazz Group was in my parents’ home. Dave played trombone in the Kid Ory style, Bruce Gray played clarinet in the Pee Wee Russell style and Lew Fisher played in the Jelly Roll Morton style, Bill Munro trumpet, John Malpas banjo, Bob Wright Tuba and Joe Tippet on drums. Now I played alto with them and that is not really “New Orleans” and not ‘pure’ so they dropped me as New Orleans music did not have saxophones. However we did record something – there is something out there of that group but I don’t know how you would find it. So that was my introduction to Trad Jazz or Dixieland as they call it in the States.

Mike: What other local gigs did you play at?

Errol: There was a quartet playing in a restaurant down at Glenelg about five nights a week with Jack Brokensha on vibes and drums, Ron Lucas on piano [who now lives in Canberra] and Johnny Foster on bass who later went with the Adelaide Symphony and Clare Bail on sax and clarinet. Clare was a great player and still is. After Clare left the band, leaving it as a trio, they heard about a job going in Melbourne at the Plaza Coffee Lounge in St Kilda. This was a very large venue with entertainment seven nights a week, 9 to 12 midnight. So the trio left to do the job and after a couple of weeks I got a call asking me to join them. So that was my exit out of Adelaide in 1947.

The Jack Brokensha group, L-R, Brokensha (vibes), Edwin Duff (vocals), Errol Buddle (tenor sax), Ron Loughhead (piano), Ken Lester (bass) at the Plaza in Melbourne… PHOTO COURTESY FAIRFAX MEDIA

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That was a wonderful experience playing jazz and a little bit of commercial music with the quartet. We had vocalists Marie Morley and Edwin Duff and a comedian compere Danny Deare. We’d change the program every two weeks. We’d get American servicemen and sailors from the ships in Port Melbourne coming to hear us and some of them came back to hear more and I wondered why - they must have heard a lot better than us! That job lasted 12 months and we did spots on ABC Radio and concerts at the Assembly Hall in Collins St. There was also an occasional concert on Sundays at the New Theatre in Flinders St with a big band led by Freddie Thomas trumpet. Some of the musicians were Billy Hyde drums, Eddie Oxley, Bobby Limb, a guy from NZ Neil Randrup and Kenny Weate saxes and Des Blundell trombone. At the Plaza we called our group The Rockettes but after about 12 months we changed pianists and Ron Loughhead came in on piano. One day Ron and I were walking along the street and I said “what have we got a name like The Rockettes for? That’s the name of a dancing group in New York. Why don’t we name it the Jack Brokensha Quartet”? So that became the name of the group from then on. In the beginning we had John Foster on bass but he left to join the Adelaide Symphony and we got Ken Lester in on bass. We were aged around 19 to 22 and Ken was 27 – I thought ‘ gee that’s old’. At this time Bob Clemens [of the music shop in Little Collins St] started his Jazzart and he asked us to do some recordings, so we did tunes such as Buddles Be-Bop Boogie and Talk of The Town, Jumpin’ With Symphony Sid – all on 78s of course. We also formed a quintet for some recordings and had Alan Nash on trumpet, Don Banks on piano and Charlie Blott on drums.

Mike: These and more tunes can now be bought from the Victorian Jazz Archive on CD. So by now you are about 19 Errol?

The Stork Club, Melbourne, May 29, 1948. From left: Ron Loughhead (pno), John Foster (bs), Craig Crawford (tenor), Jack Brokensha (drs), Ken Brentnall (trt), Errol Buddle (tenor)… PHOTO CREDIT JOHN M DUNCAN

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Errol: Yes. And now the contract at the Plaza had finished so we went around the corner to The Galleon coffee lounge for a few months and then onto Sammy Lee’s Stork Club at Blackrock, joining Craig Crawford’s band. The quartet augmented the band with Craig leading it on tenor and Ken Brentnall on trumpet. I had never heard a trumpet played like that in Australia before. He was just magnificent and played the most fluent solos.

Trumpeter Ken Brentnall: Errol had never heard a trumpet played like that in Australia before… PHOTO COURTESY AUSTRALIAN JAZZ MUSEUM

We kept that job for a few months then we got offered a short tour of country NSW and to play concerts in Sydney. There were a lot of jazz concerts in Sydney then – one every few weeks in the Town Hall, at the Assembly Hall and an occasional one at the Conservatorium. These were big attractions for the teenagers - they were packed. We went to Bathurst, Orange, Dubbo, Cessnock etc – Mel Langdon was doing the publicity for us but the first time in Bathurst not a soul turned up. Mel hadn’t sent the advance publicity so we were out in front of the hall asking people to come in. It was OK after that, the publicity arrived in time. We did a concert in Newcastle with the first African American musician I had heard live and that was Rex Stewart; he was the headliner of the concert. He had a different approach to anything I had heard.

In 1949 Jack Brokensha had a nervous breakdown, probably as a result of his war experiences and went back to Adelaide to a repatriation hospital to recover. The group broke up so I went back to Adelaide and played in a few dances there. After Jack recovered we reformed the group and went back to Sydney to a nightclub called

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Rex Stewart: the first African American musician Errol had heard live…

Golds Restaurant in York St and played six nights a week from 8 to 1 am and we got time off to do concerts in the Town Hall. The group became the most popular in Sydney along with the groups of Les Welch, Ron Gowans, Larry Stellar and Jack Allan; Don Burrows was in Canada at the time. We recorded several 78s at this time too. Then we returned to the Galleon in Melbourne. I was a bit of a ‘health nut’ in those days and went on a ‘juice fast’ and for some reason I went to see a naturopath and he said “your energy levels are way down. What on earth have you been doing”? I said to myself, I know what it is – it’s playing seven nights a week – I was quite worried about my health so I left the group and went back to Adelaide. But after six months I returned to Sydney and got a job with Bob Gibson’s new band. It was still the best band in the country and we played a couple of nights a week in ballrooms and made numerous recordings.

At the same time Bobby Limb was becoming very popular and was making lots of records with his band of which I was now a member also. I have around 20 discs I made with him. Then I got a job at Chequers Nightclub in Pitt St - six nights per week starting at 6pm and going to 1 or 2 in the morning – long hours! In the meantime another sax player loaned me some recordings of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Firebird Suite. Both works had solos by an unusual sounding instrument, I liked the sound and I realised it was the bassoon. The Rite of Spring starts with a bassoon solo. So I got in touch with the Conservatorium and went to see the bassoon teacher Wally Black who played first bassoon with the Sydney Symphony. He told me there were three bassoons for sale at J Stanley Johnson’s Music Store so he took me down there one day and picked out the best one. So I started out on bassoon and within about three weeks I was playing in the Con orchestra.

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Mike: So you really took to it easily?

Errol: Blowing the bassoon I didn’t find particularly hard but I did find the fingering very difficult. I almost gave up at one stage. We were doing mostly simple things at the Con – Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and similar works. I was now tiring of working at the nightclub six nights a week in the popular music scene and I thought ‘I don’t want to be in this pop music business much more’ so I decided to study with Wally Black to be a classical bassoon player. Then I went back to Adelaide and stayed with my parents. I then studied at the Adelaide Con with Jock Goode the principal bassoonist in the Adelaide Symphony. I can remember going to lessons with Jock and having difficulty understanding his thick Scottish accent. I really became interested in classical music and started collecting lots of classical LPs.

Back in Sydney I had met a young NZ drummer Don Varella - he played with us once - a very good drummer. He went over to Vancouver, Canada and he used to write to me when I was in Adelaide [still going to the Con] saying how he had heard Duke Ellington with Louis Bellson and Paul Gonsalves. Don suggested I join him in Canada.

Duke Ellington (left) pictured here with the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves…

He wrote again to say an Australian pianist, Chris Gosper, had been in Windsor, and that there was a club in Windsor The Elbow Room which could be interested in a group. This sounded good to me but I found that as I would have had to wait six months to get a ship passage, I had to fly to Canada [most travel was by ship in those days]. So in 1952 I flew to Vancouver with Canadian Pacific Airlines via

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Auckland, Fiji and Canton Island, refuelling at each stop. As we were approaching Hawaii I saw flames coming from one of the four engines! They checked us into the Moana Hotel for two nights right on Waikiki beach while they repaired the engine. I looked around for some jazz clubs and the first one I found had Anita O’Day performing and another had a group led by Trummy Young.

American singer Anita O’Day: she was performing in Hawaii in 1952 when Errol was on the way to Canada… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

It took a further 18 hours to fly from Hawaii to Vancouver where I met Don Varella and he took me down to meet the secretary of the Musicians Union who said “oh we like English stock out here”. He offered me a position playing bassoon with the Vancouver Symphony but I turned it down as our destination was Windsor and the Elbow Room. After arriving in Vancouver Don Varella and I set off on a trip through the US and travelled down to San Francisco by train and checked into the YMCA on Don Burrows’ recommendation. There was a jazz club right across the road named The Black Hawk with the Earl Bostic band playing there. They played R&B style music and they had a very good tenor player with them who turned out to be , long before he became well-known. On visiting Los Angeles we heard the Les Brown Band at the Hollywood Palladium and during interval a band member recommended we go to The Haig and hear the Quartet. This was the group without a piano. We were sceptical about the lack of a piano but we went along anyway – the band had on trumpet, Carson Smith bass and on drums – so we had the pleasure of hearing the group in its early development; it was two years before they became nationally famous. Don Burrows

16 had done a similar trip 18 months before us with Gus Merzi, Jack Lander bass and Mark Bowden drums. They went to Toronto because that was where the music was happening in Canada but they struck a big snag with the Union - they wouldn’t let them in. Every city in Canada and the USA were all members of the American Federation of Musicians [AFofM], but they all had their own local rules. For instance you had to live in Toronto for 12 months before you could get in the Union so this really put a ‘spanner in the works’ for Don as they had an excellent fully rehearsed group of clarinet, accordion, bass and drums ready to work.

Don stayed in Toronto a while and then decided to return home. Jack waited out the 12-month period and joined the Union. Meanwhile Gus found a club where he could work ‘non -Union’ until a Union rep found him working and was told “you will never get a card in this town”. However Gus already had his return ticket so he wasn’t too worried. A tragedy really because they were all great players but unknowingly went to the wrong city. We went to Windsor and were in the Union the second day we were there - they had different rules and on paying a $50 entrance fee we were in the Union. Our plan to work at The Elbow Room became a reality after a pianist named Howard Lucas, who had just left the Billy May band came over the river from to join us. We played there for one week. I was also fortunate to eventually gain a

Charlie Parker: he played even better than Errol had heard on records to that time... PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

17 position playing bassoon with the Windsor Symphony for about 18 months. I also played with the Canadian Ford Motor Company concert band doing quite a few concerts in parks etc even though sometimes it was so cold you could hardly play your instrument. One of the attractions of being in Windsor is that it is less than a mile over the river to Detroit in the US – similar to Sydney city to North Sydney - so I went over almost every day to hear the visiting groups that played there. It was like going into another world. Among the groups I heard was playing in a ‘black’ ballroom on the main street in Detroit.

Mike: What was that like, I love his music, it must have been something special to see him in person?

Errol: Yes I had a choice that night of hearing Bird or the band at another venue with but I heard Zoot another time so that was OK. I thought Charlie played the best I’d ever heard him, even better than I’d heard on records to that time. I spoke to him standing in the middle of the dance floor during a break and he was as ‘happy as Larry’ that night, with a beaming smile ear to ear. Then I heard him about six months later at a jazz club in Detroit on a Sunday afternoon matinee and he looked really, really depressed and down. I thought maybe he’s not happy with the rhythm section or something but I later heard that a week before this, his daughter had died in New York while he was in Los Angeles but it was absolutely wonderful to hear him again. [Charlie and Chan’s daughter, Pree died in March 1954 – one year and a week before Charlie himself passed away. Ed.] I later heard the Stan Kenton band with what I thought was his best personnel ever, Lee Konitz, , , , Conte Condoli and etc – I’ve never heard a trombone player like that before or since! There

Frank Rosolino: Errol had never heard a trombone player like that before or since…

18 were a couple of ballrooms and clubs that had regular touring groups playing there and I heard people like Lester Young with a quartet, Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb and the big bands of Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton and Sauter-Finegan. I also heard and the quintet he had at the time with John Williams on piano and on valve trombone - what a group that was! But you see, most of these bands only lasted about six months on the road before they would split up.

Mike: So all the while you had a steady financial base being in the Windsor Orchestra?

Errol: Yes and I played in a few clubs in Windsor and finally got a job with a sextet at the Sunnyside Tavern right on the Detroit River that was apparently a “speakeasy” during the prohibition times. It was a large venue and on Saturday nights they had floor shows and brought over attractions from Detroit. We had Dakota Staton a few times; she was wonderful. The guys in the band loved her, a vivacious person, and Della Reese who later got the lead role in the TV show Touched By An Angel. came to town to play at the Bluebird Lounge which is in the black area of Detroit where I had previously heard Wardell Grey and . Miles stayed at this club for about three or four months playing six nights a week – I heard so much

Miles Davis: oh man, I love horses… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

Miles Davis, it was wonderful – he was playing with the house band there of drums, Tommy Flanagan piano [later to become ’s accompanist, Ed.] and Alvin Jackson bass. One day Don Varella and I went over to see him and he invited us up to his room which was a block down the road. Just a small room with about two dozen paper-back Westerns on a mantelpiece over the fireplace. I wondered why he was reading these; I thought he would be reading Steinbeck or someone like that with the brain he had. I asked him “how come you are reading

19 these Westerns and he said ‘oh man, I love horses’.” It turns out that he used to ride horses on his father’s ranch – his father was a dentist and quite well off and used to raise horses. Miles spoke of how he hated being on heroin and wanted to get off it. Several months later he went “cold turkey” at his father’s ranch and kicked the habit then.

Mike: And now you teamed up with Tommy Flanagan and Elvin Jones?

Errol: Yes but before this we had a big band in Windsor that used to rehearse every Sunday at the Showgrounds and as Kenton’s band had broken up we had Frank Rosolino [who was from Detroit] on second trombone with Parkey Groat on lead trombone [who had left the Kenton band probably because of the one-nighters and continual travelling] and Eddie Pinson on lead alto from one of the bands before he went to the four brothers set-up. Frank used to drive over in his little Nash Rambler, a tiny car for an American. The main jazz club that employed local musicians in Detroit, as opposed to the Rouge Lounge that featured the big names, was Klein’s Show Bar on 12th Street. Don Varella and I used to go over to Klein’s to hear Rosolino and another time, with whom I sat in for a set one time. On another night we went to hear with a quintet and Don kept urging me to ask for a sit-in and I said “no I can’t sit-in with those guys, they are way out of my class” but eventually I got the courage to ask Yusef if I could sit in as he passed our table and he said “yeah brother, have you got your mouthpiece”? I carried it everywhere anyway so he said “you can borrow my tenor, but look after it, it’s a brand new Selmer - I only bought it yesterday”!

Saxophonist Yusef Lateef: at Klein’s he loaned Errol his brand new Selmer tenor…

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Mike: Gosh that is something.

Errol: What a nice guy – I sat-in for the whole 40-minute set then sat down at our table with Don and next thing this little Jewish guy, George Klein [the owner of the club] came up smoking a cigar and sat down with us and said “do ya wanna job”? I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing and I said, I suppose so. He said “I’d like you to take over Yusef’s band”. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. I said well what about the Union, how can I get my Detroit card and he said ‘don’t worry about that, leave that to me’. I already had a work permit at that time which an agent obtained for me on agreement that he got 10% commission of any earnings. So George Klein offered me six nights a week on a three-month contract and when Yusef’s contract expired I joined the band – everything is done with contracts over there and you must keep to it. Of all things he said ‘I want you to take over the band and whip these guys into shape’. I thought ‘you’ve gotta be kidding!’ Here was Tommy Flanagan with Alvin Jackson on bass [Milt’s brother], an excellent drummer Frank Gant and John Di Vita on trumpet.

Pianist Tommy Flanagan: one of the players Errol was expected to keep in line… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

Mike: Were you the only white fella in the band then?

Errol: No John Di Vita was white too, but most of the customers were black – it’s sad, but mostly, white people went to white clubs and black people to black clubs. At first it was very hard, it meant me having to learn all these different tunes I didn’t know - a lot of various lines.

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Mike: How do you learn these tunes? Did somebody write it out and you commit it to memory?

Errol: Well how I did it then as I remember – they’d say for instance, let’s do Scrapple From The Apple and I didn’t know the line. I knew it was based on Honeysuckle Rose but I didn’t know the line so Tommy would say ‘John knows it so just go along with him’ and after a few of times I learnt it and as we were doing six nights a week, 9pm to 2am, I soon got on top of it all. But what was absolutely nerve- racking was they wanted to play very fast tempos, really fast and at first I didn’t know if I was coming or going, but after a while you get used to playing fast. One night a guy walked in with a portable reel to reel tape recorder and he recorded a few sets and he gave me a copy of the tape later that I have on CDs now. It’s a rough balance with only one mike but Tommy did the most beautiful solos. On Saturday nights after I had been there about a month George Klein brought in tenor player Billy Mitchell

Saxophonist Billy Mitchell: he came in every Saturday night for a “battle of the saxes” … PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST who later became the deputy leader of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. Billy was a real extrovert; a very, very good player and George would advertise it out the front as “The Battle of the Saxes” – now here’s me trying to do battle with this monster tenor player – a bit like David and Goliath. At best I may have won the battle one night! One night we decided to play a blues, and like I said he was a real extrovert and when his turn came for a solo he called out “one” before his first chorus. I wondered what he was up to - then at the next chorus he called out “two”; he got up to 100! He did 100 choruses that night; I don’t know how long it went on for – half the set? Then the three-month contract finished, but the manager George said “I’d like you to lead the next band”. I was stunned. I thought ‘why is this guy being so good to me?’ He was

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Jewish so maybe he sensed I didn’t have any racism in me especially as blacks and Jews were very involved in jazz, a lot of good players were Jewish like Lee Konitz, Barney Kessel, Stan Getz etc and many of the jazz club owners were Jewish or Italian and our agent later on, Joe Glaser was Jewish. So I said ‘who do you want in the new band?’and he said he had Barry Harris on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, Major Holley on bass and on baritone sax. So around mid-1954 I started with that band. I had heard Harris playing before with Miles Davis at the Bluebird and he backed people like Sonny Stitt, Lester Young and Charlie Parker on one of the nights I heard him. We started that first set and I wondered what hit me?! I’d never heard drums like this before – we were used to drummers like Max Roach and Shelley Manne – he’s doing everything, his bass drum’s going like mad and all different rhythms that I’d never heard before. I didn’t know if I liked it or not, it was so busy.

The famous shot taken at Klein’s, Detroit, in 1953. Buddle (centre) is on tenor. To the left is Pepper Adams (baritone), to the right Barry Harris (piano). Obscured behind Buddle is Elvin Jones (drums). To the left (outside the picture) was Major Holley (bass).

Mike: Was it getting in the way?

Errol: Well I wasn’t used to it, I was used to hearing ‘straight ahead’ drummers like Roach and Manne but after a while I realised how good he was. He was so inspiring to play with. Pepper Adams was an outstanding baritone player; they were all nice guys, just real gentlemen. One night just before we were to start at 9pm Elvin Jones came bursting into the room shouting at the top of his voice “Thad’s made it – he’s with Basie”! His older brother Thad Jones had just joined the band. Now and then Paul Chambers would come to hear us. He was about 21 and would stand

23 right in front of the stage looking up at us. He asked if he could sit-in but Major Holley wouldn’t let him. I guess he was wary of sitters-in because they could sometimes take your job. Paul joined the Miles Davis group just three years later.

Elvin Jones: He came in one night and said that his brother Thad had made it – he was with Basie…

Mike: With Pepper on baritone and you on tenor were there any doubles?

Errol: In the first group with Tommy on piano I brought the bassoon in for a few nights and I rigged up a contact mic but I kept tripping over the cables swapping horns so I gave it away. That was the first time I tried to play jazz on the bassoon. So that lasted for three months.

One night Barry Harris and Pepper came into the club assisting a guy with them and introduced me to Lucky Thompson, one of my idols – he was a native of Detroit too. It was good to meet him but he wasn’t too well then. That contract finished and I was off for three weeks but by that time I was fairly well known in Detroit as there was an ad every day for six months in the afternoon paper – the Detroit Free Press - for Klein’s with my name in it and because of that I got offers to take a group into other clubs in Detroit. Then George Klein asked me to come back to join a group with on guitar, Barry Harris, Elvin Jones and Kenny’s brother Billy on bass. A girl pianist Terry Pollard came in a few times; she was very very good. The guy with the tape recorder came and recorded that group too and there is some tremendous Elvin Jones on it; talk about inspiring! I used to walk home with Elvin after the gig, his home was on the way to my place and one night he said to me “why don’t you and me make a record”? I thought ‘who am I to make a record with you? Where would we make it? I wasn’t familiar enough with Detroit to know where. I wished I had but it

24 didn’t happen. Elvin was married to a Japanese girl Keiko who was on one of his record covers.

Also, when I was playing at Kleins in Detroit I was in a big band run by Fred Dale, patterned on the Woody Herman band - with three tenors and baritone - and we used to rehearse thoroughly, bar by bar on weekends in a room at the University of . was one of the trumpet players and Clare Fischer did the arrangements. Clare later became music director for the Hi Los and he put out a few of his own also.

The original Australian Jazz Quartet: Bryce Rohde (at the piano) then, clockwise, Errol Buddle, Dick Healey, Jack Brokensha…

After about six weeks with Kenny Burrell a call came from Ed Sarkesian the manager of the Rouge Lounge where all the big names played - people like Getz, Gillespie, Konitz, Peterson and Mulligan - all those top players. He said “I hear you’ve got an Australian group”? Well Jack Brokensha and Bryce Rohde had come over from Adelaide in 1953 when I was in Windsor with the idea of forming an Australian group. We had an agent in Philadelphia who had offered to get us work but he let us down. That became an annoyance over there with agents – we wished they would tell us straight out. Well Bryce and Jack were now in Detroit and working with a trumpet player Johnny ‘Scat’ Davis doing a series of TV programs around the smaller cities near Detroit that paid quite well - I did a spot on one or two of them also. Ed

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Sarkesian asked if we would be interested in doing a week over Christmas at the Rouge Lounge. He said the Stan Kenton band had broken up and he’d like us to back his singer Chris Connor. We were to play a few tunes, then she would come on and do the rest of the set. So I rang Bryce and Jack and said ‘this looks like a good opportunity’. The TV shows had stopped and they weren’t doing much so we formed the Australian Jazz Quartet. In the meantime Conte Candoli rang and asked me if I would like to join his quintet. What a decision to make? But I had already made a commitment with the AJQ and things were looking hopeful after two years of trying to get the group together. So I had to decline Conte’s offer.

Mike: So it’s the three of you, who was the fourth one?

Errol: I wanted to get Don Burrows over and I wrote to him and he replied [I still have his letter], saying that “I’d love to join the group and by the way I am now playing flute and baritone not just alto and clarinet” and I thought that would be great, what a great combination of instruments! However it was going to take Don a while to get over and we needed someone pretty much right away. The guys asked Dick Healy who played alto, flute and bass and who had previously done a couple of sessions with them to join the group. So unfortunately we couldn’t get Don, I wished he could have been in it, he would have been a tremendous asset to the group.

Mike: It would have been sensational wouldn’t it?

Errol: What we could have done with all those different combinations of instruments! In the meantime I decided I would use the bassoon on a couple of tunes with the group until eventually it became about 50-50 tenor and bassoon. So we did the week with Chris Connor and she was speaking with her agent, Joe Glaser of the Associated Booking Corporation, 745 Fifth Avenue, New York City. Joe had all the

The agent Joe Glaser: he had all the major jazz groups like Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, George Shearing and Dave Brubeck… PHOTO COURTESY WIKIPEDIA major jazz groups like Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, George Shearing and Dave Brubeck – a whole lot of groups. So Chris told Joe Glaser what the group was like and must have given us a good rap. He probably said ‘do you think they are worth signing

26 up?’ and she obviously said ‘yes’ so he sent us contracts in the mail. We got a four- year contract! You wouldn’t read about it, you couldn’t plan this if you tried. There was someone else behind this.

Mike: God maybe [laughing]?

Singer Chris Connor: the AJQ was booked by Joe Glaser to back her in London, Ontario for a week at Campbell’s Tavern…

Errol: I think He must have had a hand in it, it was just so impossible. So Joe signed us up and our first job was to back Chris in London, Ontario for a week at Campbell’s Tavern which was a beautiful restaurant, then back to the Rouge Lounge to do another week with , who had just arrived from England. Talk about going from nothing to the top jobs in about three weeks – we were booked for a concert in Washington DC with Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Carmen McRae. We did a few of our own tunes then backed Carmen – I mean every jazz musician in America was trying to get on these concerts! The first time we played in Chicago was at the Blue Note with the Napoleon brothers Teddy and Marty [both pianists] and another stint at the Modern Jazz Room, this club had three floors, the Dukes of Dixieland were on the ground floor as you walked in, on the next floor and we were on the third level. The Australian Jazz Quintet got mentioned in the Downbeat and Metronome reader’s polls three years in a row [1956 to ‘58]. We came way down the list though, about 15th I think. In the tenor sax section of the Downbeat poll I came about 17th and in the miscellaneous section, along with , mellophones etc, I came about 8th on bassoon.

Mike: I think that’s marvellous Errol, because for me the 50s were the ‘golden era’ of music quality in jazz and for you to figure so well in the polls is really something.

Errol: Yes it was a good time for small jazz groups like the Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan groups. We figured out that by the amount of work we were getting we were about the fifth most popular jazz group in clubs and concerts. It

27 doesn’t mean to say we were a superior group because we weren’t – we were just more popular.

Buddle during the AJQ days in the US: we were not a superior group, because we weren’t – we were just more popular….

Mike: There were more ‘colours’ than other bands perhaps with the bassoon, flute and vibes?

Errol: Yes, and Americans like something different.

Errol: When we got back to Australia a couple of guys here said it would be easy to get a job there being Australian, “they like Australians” but most Americans didn’t know anything about Australia, only those who were out here during the war years. One night in a club in Hollywood a black guy asked me about black people in Australia not wearing clothes and I said, you might find some in the ‘outback’ and he said “man I’m goin’ there”. Another guy said to me “you’re from Australia that’s an island off the coast of Japan ain’t it”? They knew we had kangaroos, that’s about all. The reason the group was a success was the different instrumentation and a unique concept. Also they’d never heard a bassoon in jazz before which was a big talking point over there. We had flute and bassoon, alto and tenor combinations… Jack would play vibes sometimes, just a lot of different colours in the group; not only that, but we were also extremely well organised. We had arrangements done by or

28 ourselves and others and we could’ve played over ten hours without a break – we memorised the whole lot.

Mike: I don’t know how you do that?

Errol: Well you just had to. None of the small jazz groups read music on stage, only the big bands. We just had everything down ‘pat’.

Mike: You would have been reliable also.

Errol: Well one time we played opposite Miles Davis in Boston and he didn’t turn up for the first night. Our first job in NY in February 1955 was four weeks at the Hickory House the last jazz club on 52nd Street, and after playing there a few nights in walked Stan Getz! He sat down and listened to a whole set then left to go back to his

Stan Getz: in New York he sat down and listened to a whole set then left to go back to his gig around the corner at Birdland… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST gig around the corner at Birdland. He came again the next night and I couldn’t believe he came to hear my tenor playing - I was nowhere near his standard - but ten years later I read that he played bassoon in his high school orchestra so perhaps his interest was in the jazz bassoon. After the Washington DC concert I’ve got write ups and a whole lot of photographs from the Washington Post [refer graphic Ed.]. We started going over better than a lot of the American groups. We weren’t near their standard musically. We weren’t anywhere near as good jazz players, we just had something a bit different. We had the instruments so we used them and that turned out to be different to any other group.

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Mike: To jump ahead a moment – when you came back to Australia and did a tour I went to the Melbourne Town Hall concert and it is one of my favourite musical memories. How good that group was, by golly Errol you were fantastic.

Errol: Well we had been playing together about four years or so by then, so we had managed to get things together a bit. But Americans go for something different. You cannot go over there sounding like another group; you wouldn’t get an agent to book you and unless you’ve got an agent, forget it! For some months after the Washington concert we worked a lot with Carmen McRae. We’d do three tunes and she’d come on and do the rest of the set. The hours of most of the clubs were 9pm to 2am, six nights a week, five sets a night. So after several months we both became well-known and we went our separate ways. The AJQ were fortunate to get on the “jazz circuit” which was a tour of about six months of playing in the top jazz clubs in the major cities. Joe Glaser booked most of the groups and if they liked you the first time, you were booked for a repeat tour.

The AJQ worked a lot with the singer Carmen McRae (pictured above)… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

Some groups did a tour but wouldn’t be asked back. We did this for about four years and it would go something like this – starting at Detroit for two weeks, Cleveland for a week, Pittsburgh, New York for two weeks, Boston one week, Washington DC, Toronto Canada, Chicago for two weeks, St Louis, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles for two weeks along with a few smaller cities.

We were driving in our cars from city to city and we usually only had two or three weeks off in a year. The working hours were 9pm to 4am in NY, 10pm to 5am in Chicago and in LA and most other towns it was 9pm to 2am. To quote from

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Wikipedia: “Some of the clubs we played at were the Hickory House, Birdland, Basin Street, and the Roundtable in New York; the Blue Note, Modern Jazz Room, and Robert's Show Room in Chicago; Storyville in Boston; Jazz City and Peacock Lane in Hollywood; Macumba and Jazz Showcase in San Francisco; Sonny's Lounge in Denver; Peacock Alley in St. Louis; Rouge Lounge in Detroit; Peps, Blue Note and Showboat in Philadelphia; Midway Lounge in Pittsburgh; Colonial and Town Tavern in Toronto, and many others. At many of these clubs the AJQ shared the band stand with well-known groups such as the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Les Brown Orchestra, Count Basie Orchestra, Johnny Smith Quartet, Miles Davis, JJ Johnson, Max Roach- Quintet, Quintet, Teddy and Marty Napoleon Quartet, Thelonious Monk, Conte Candoli/ Quintet, Ahmad Jamal Trio, Don Shirley Trio, Lee Konitz [with the Gerry Mulligan group], Woody Herman and others.”

Mike: Where did you stay when you were on tour?

Errol: We each had a car and drove most of the time but occasionally flew. On the one-nighters we’d stay in hotels and on the longer gigs we stayed in apartments. So we were on the road a lot but it was easier than life in a big band. They mostly did one-nighters which are really tough and that’s why personnel changed so quickly in those bands. When we played at Birdland or Basin Street we would have people like Jane Russell, Dan Dailey and David Wayne and other big name movie and Broadway actors visit. I was quite amused one night at Birdland, I had just finished a bassoon solo – when in the dark club a guy came running up to me saying “crazy man crazy”. He seemed so impressed with the bassoon and I later found out it was Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis who later joined the Count Basie band! The AJQ at one time did two weeks at Birdland with Basie and later a 30-night concert tour as well.

Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis: he came running up saying “crazy man crazy”… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

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Mike: That must have been a thrill being so close to one of the legendary big bands?

Errol: Yes it was, but by this time we had heard a lot of very good big bands, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Sauter Finegan, and the Maynard Ferguson band but the Basie band with their incredible ‘feel’ were really special. Talking about big bands, when I was in Windsor I met the local disc jockey Phil McKellar - he was a big fan of Woody Herman’s band and played a lot of his music - at station CKLW, which was the strongest radio station in North America; it’s signal reached down to New Orleans. Phil also played drums himself. Woody used to listen to his broadcasts and in fact wrote a tune called That Fella McKellar for him. In May 1954 Phil rang me one night and said Woody wants to hear you. I asked, well how can I do that and Phil said Woody is playing at Basin Street in New York and he will fly you down and pay your fare and all you have to do is sit-in with the band. So I flew down and sat-in for two nights, one set each time – some members of the band then were Nat Pierce piano, Jerry Coker, Dick Hafer tenors, Cy Touff on bass trumpet, Red Kelly bass. On one of these days he did a recording session for Capitol at Columbia Studios in New York and he invited me along to listen, that’s where they recorded Opus De Funk amongst others. Woody said he had another couple of guys to try out first. The next one was who was not only a good player but he did arranging too so he got the job. Woody and the band came to Detroit and Windsor a few times after that and when someone was sick one night I worked with the band in Detroit - I sat- in another couple of times too. He was a very inspiring leader; all the guys in the band loved him.

Woody Herman: he flew Errol to New York to audition him for the band… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

Mike: I could well imagine that. What day did you have off?

Errol: Usually Mondays, depending on the city. I must tell you of an ‘amusing’ incident we had in Chicago in Sept 1956. We had been playing there for two weeks and after my wife and I had checked out of the Southmoor Hotel to drive to Detroit

32 we pulled up at a service station to get petrol and just as we were about to drive off a policeman on a motorcycle pulled up beside me and asked to see my licence. As I reached over to the back seat to get the licence from my rain coat, he jumped and pulled his gun - he thought I was going for a gun myself! He had me drive to the police station and empty my pockets and after verifying my booking at the Southmoor he let us go. Apparently there had been a bank robbery that morning by a man and a woman both wearing raincoats and driving a car similar to ours – a green and white Buick.

Mike: Perhaps the hold-up weapon was the neck of a saxophone? Tell us more about the development of the AJQ.

Errol: I don’t know how we did without a bass on some tunes in the quartet, but we did; however the bassoon helped by playing lines under the flute. Mostly Dick played bass and occasionally changed to alto or flute but funnily enough when Jack played vibes, who got the job to play drums but me! I did my best but I don’t know how I had the nerve to do it. Well one night we were doing a concert in Orchestra Hall in Chicago – the home of the Chicago Symphony – Jack was out the front playing vibes and I was playing drums and I looked to the side of the stage and there was watching me! He probably couldn’t believe his ears.

The Australian Jazz Quintet at the Cotton Club, Cleveland. L-R, Bryce Rohde (piano), Errol Buddle (bassoon), Dick Healey (flute), Jimmy Gannon (bass), Jack Brokensha (vibes)… PHOTO CREDIT JOE A McGHEE

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Mike: I’m sure it would have showed up if you weren’t quite competent – so it’s another string to the bow and I doubt if Philly Joe would play bassoon as well as you!

Errol: Yes, I just tried to keep good time and hopefully got a good sound out of the drums. The AJQ appeared on several national television shows, the most notable being the Tonight Show, The Dave Garroway, Today Show, The Arthur Godfrey Show, In Town Tonight Chicago, and the Ed Mackenzie and Soupy Sales Shows from ABC in Detroit. On the radio we played on NBC's Monitor, ABC's Parade of the Bands, and we were guest artists on the Woolworth Hour where they also had ’s Orchestra with Gisele MacKenzie singing with them. All this was unbelievably good publicity; these shows went nationwide.

Mike: How many recordings did the AJQ make during these years?

Errol: We recorded seven AJQ LPs during our time in the US and we were on the recording of the orchestrated by Russell Garcia in January 1956. Most of our recordings were made in New York but we did the Varsity Drag album in Los Angeles. The second album was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio. Rudy is possibly the best recording engineer in the business.

Mike: What were some of the concert highlights for the AJQ?

Errol: Joe Glaser used to put on a 28 major city jazz concert tour over 30 nights each November. We did these national concert tours in 1955-57. In 1955 there was the “Modern Jazz Show” with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Gerry Mulligan, Carmen McRae and us. Now after the first year the AJQ became a quintet and lo and behold we were booked again on the 1956 tour called “Music For Moderns”, with Count Basie, Erroll Garner, Septet, , and Gerry Mulligan Quartet.

In 1957, there was again "Music For Moderns" with the George Shearing Quintet, Gerry Mulligan Quintet, Chico Hamilton, Helen Merrill, Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis. These tours included performances at major concert halls, including

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Orchestra Hall [the home of the Chicago Symphony] and Carnegie Hall in New York. This was in the northern winter of course and I remember driving through the suburbs into Chicago one cold November night on the band bus [with all the concert musicians] to play at Orchestra Hall and we were looking down into the cosy living rooms with families sitting around the fire; Cannonball Adderley who was sitting behind me said “man, who’s the squares”? Numerous groups in America would have liked to play on these concert tours and we were booked on every one. If you planned this you couldn’t do it! These concerts would go on for about 28 to 30 nights [one nighters] and on each concert the groups would do a 40 minute set and we did this each year for three consecutive years with different groups. On one of these concert tours Gerry Mulligan formed a magnificent sextet with himself on baritone, Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone, Jon Eardley trumpet, Zoot Sims tenor, Dave Bailey drums and Henry Grimes on bass. A really good group that he only had for six months or so and he made a couple of albums with it – it was his pride and joy at the time.

Gerry Mulligan on baritone: he formed a magnificent sextet that was his pride and joy at the time… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

At the start of the concert tour we were on after interval for a few nights so people were still coming in after we had started playing, then we found we were opening the concert, then another night we were on before interval. They kept changing our appearance time slot. Now both Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck had financial interests in the tour and we found out Gerry was responsible for our change in time slot. We were getting more applause than his new group and he put it down to the position we were on the program! Despite all the changes we still kept going over better than him which is just ridiculous; his group was so good.

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On another night in Orchestra Hall in Chicago we had played about three tunes and the curtains were closed on us. I looked over to the wings and there was Mulligan laughing his head off, he’d told the guy on the curtains to close them. When Brubeck heard about it [and he had a bigger share in the concert] he told Mulligan to ‘cool it’. Then for the rest of the year we would do clubs. We worked for around 48 weeks of the year consistently playing most of the big cities. Most groups were lucky to work that much. I think somebody ‘up there’ liked us. In 1956 we played in Hollywood at Jazz City on Hollywood Boulevard for a couple of weeks and one night walked in. I spoke with him during a break and asked what he’d been doing and he said “I just got out of jail yesterday”!

The altoist Art Pepper: he had just got out of jail the day before… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

Mike: He had made a mess of himself hadn’t he?

Errol: Yes, he got hooked on drugs. However he said someone was loaning him a Martin alto and I have seen pictures of him with it since.

Mike: I have read that the AJQ backed too?

Errol: Actually, I met my future wife Olive-Ann over there and after we got married we spent a late honeymoon down in Miami. We were booked to play at a club there called The Ball and Chain - appropriate as we had just married. We backed Billie Holiday there for two weeks. We opened each set with a few tunes ourselves then Billie would come on for the rest of the set. She still wore the gardenia in her hair.

Mike: Did she like the group; you would have been different to any backing she had before?

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Errol: I think she did. We didn’t get in the way and we didn’t overplay. I think that’s what she liked. In between her sets she would go to the bar and often sit alone; few people went up to talk to her as she had a reputation of being on drugs and in fact she

Billie Holiday: she still wore the gardenia in her hair… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST could not get a ‘cabaret card’ to work in New York. Sadly she died a year or so later. A week after she finished with us she recorded a TV special in New York with Roy Eldridge, Mulligan, Hawkins, Webster and Lester Young and others.

Mike: Yes it is Billie sitting on a stool singing Fine and Mellow surrounded by the musicians, I am a bit biased but Lester’s solo was just magic – they were like musical siblings. Now did you do a lot of studio work then?

Lester Young (left) pictured with Billie Holiday… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

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Errol: No, not this time, only our own recordings. Studio work was very hard to get into. We booked an American bass player Jimmy Gannon to replace Jack Lander who went back to Toronto [he played bass with Don Burrows when they came over]. One day Jimmy asked if I was working the following Saturday night, “no”, well there is a 21st birthday party on Long Island for Sal Mineo the actor. Would you like to do the gig? I asked who else was in the group and he said John Williams is on piano, a wonderful player who went on to become one of Hollywood’s best film score writers [he had played in the Stan Getz group also]. John was in New York studying composition and I loved his playing especially the way he comped. Sal was there with about 12 girls at his table - he played drums and sat-in with us.

Mike: He portrayed Gene Krupa in the 1959 film about Gene’s life.

Errol: Yes, he was actually quite a good drummer and he played the drums in the film. He was also in the movie Rebel Without A Cause but he was murdered in 1976. Like I said, we played in Birdland quite often on two-week engagements – there were always three groups who would take turns including the Count Basie band - it was continuous jazz all night long. There was a little guy on the door at Birdland, Pee Wee Marquette who also introduced each group before they came on, - he came up to us on our first night before our first set and said “you look after me and I will look after you”. In other words, if we give him a good tip he will give us a good introduction. Tipping is a matter of course in New York as you know.

The Australian Jazz Quintet, playing at the Continental Restaurant, Norfolk, Virginia in June, 1956. Visible are (from left) Buddle, Dick Healey and the bassist Jack Lander. This photograph is a historic one, because the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet with Richie Powell (piano) played this club the previous week. It was the last club engagement for Brown and Powell, who were killed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on the way to Chicago on June 25, 1956…

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Two of the attractions when we played at Basin Street were Les Brown and Ella Fitzgerald - music ‘wall to wall’. We played at Norfolk, Virginia [which is a big naval base] at the Continental Restaurant. The Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet had played there the week before us and it was just after this that Clifford died. [To partially quote from Wikipedia: “It was after this engagement in June 1956 that Clifford Brown and Richie Powell the pianist were being driven from Norfolk to Chicago by Powell's wife Nancy for the band's next appearance. While driving on a rainy night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, west of Bedford, Nancy lost control of the car and it went off the road. All three were killed in the resulting crash.” -Ed.]

Errol: When we were playing at this club in Virginia, a friend from Melbourne, trombonist Orm “Slush” Stewart came to hear the group. He was with an English band and they were doing an ‘exchange deal’ where if an American band plays in England then an English band gets an engagement in America. We were playing in Boston for a week and the other group was the Miles Davis Quintet. We would do alternating sets over five hours. One night, as I was getting ready to go on, Miles came to the band room followed by Hank Mobley and he said to Hank “man, why don’t you go home, you’re not making it”. Another night he said to me “man, a band is as good as the drummer and this drummer’s not makin’ it” – this was Art Taylor. Miles seemed to like pouring out his problems to me. On another night, during the same week, he said “man, why don’t you play more tenor and less bassoon”? I didn’t know whether he liked the tenor or hated the bassoon, [much laughter].

Miles Davis: man, why don’t you play more tenor and less bassoon?… PHOTO CREDIT FRANCIS WOLFF

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Mike: His behaviour seemed to be erratic in his later years so you couldn’t take some of what he said seriously?

Errol: Yes you’d never know, he would have been very demanding to work with. One night in Boston at the Storyville Club I was told there were some people at the back of the club who wanted to talk to me. It turned out they were the four bassoon players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They said to me “you are lucky playing the music you like to play. We have to play what we are told to”.

Mike: Your bassoon would have done more work than most I would think?

Errol: When I went to North America I took the bassoon I had bought in Sydney, a Czechoslovakian Kohlert. It was quite a good bassoon but then I heard that the best make was a Heckel from Wiesbaden, West Germany at the time. I heard that the principal bassoonist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Sol Schoenbach had three bassoons with one for sale. In fact Sol had just left the orchestra to head a music school though he still remained with the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. I arranged to meet Sol at Hans Moennig’s instrument repair shop, an amazing repairman – he showed me this black bassoon – there are several keys to operate with the left thumb and on this bassoon a few keys were in different positions and I said to him “I’ll never get used to that” and he replied “we are largely creatures of habit you know” so I bought it with a loan from a bank – a beautiful bassoon. Apparently when Hans got a bassoon from the Heckel factory he would work on it and make it play even better. I asked why don’t they do that in the factory and he said they don’t have the technicians,. [check this web site for info about Hans – http://www.marvinroth.com/bassoonists.htm - Ed.]

Mike: Did you do any other recording?

Errol: Not during the time of the AJQ although Carmen McRae wanted me to do a recording using bassoon with her. She did eventually do a recording using woodwinds but we never crossed paths so I was not on it. I also had an offer to record an album playing bassoon from Wes Hensel, trumpet and arranger with the Les Brown band. He said next time you are in Los Angeles we will do it, but when we got to LA the Brown band was in New York so we couldn’t do it. For our first time in LA we stayed at a motel on Sunset Boulevard that had a swimming pool in the middle of the courtyard. After swimming one day I had pains in my chest that at first I was afraid might be TB but I later realised it was the smog - it was so bad. I was told that Igor Stravinsky lived on the cliff above where we stayed. We did an album in Hollywood called At The Varsity Drag with Frankie Capp on drums to enable Jack to play vibes. However of all things to do before an all-day session in the studio, we had a party the night before and who should gate crash the party but Tex Morton. Frankie had too much to drink that night and was off to the bathroom after each take – he was green, same colour as the walls of the studio. I enjoyed taking movies on my 8mm camera and I took movies of that session and Frank did not look too well. I took quite a lot of movies in the States then – for instance, travelling on the bus with

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Miles and Cannonball fast asleep, eating at restaurants with all the guys between cities. Once backstage at a concert hall I went into the men’s toilet and there was Dizzy and Gerry Mulligan jamming together and I took movies of this! We made seven LPs altogether for Bethlehem Records and when our contract expired after a few years I wanted to go with Mercury or Columbia but the rest of the guys wanted to stay with Bethlehem as they offered us a lump sum payment as an advance on royalties so I went along with it. We were also on a three-LP set of a jazz version of Porgy and Bess, recorded for Bethlehem at Columbia Studios in New York. Mel Torme was Porgy, Francis Faye was Bess with Duke Ellington’s orchestra doing the opening tracks. Frank Rosolino played and sang on it, Stan Levy, Bill Holman, Sallie Blair, Joe Derise, Betty Roche, Johnny Hartman and Al “Jazzbo” Collins amongst others.

Dizzy Gillespie: he and Gerry Mulligan were jamming in the toilet… PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

Mike: That is the one where Russ Garcia did most of the arrangements – Bethlehem have since reproduced this album on a two-CD set with an excellent booklet and I bought it from Amazon after Russ told me about it.

Errol: I never met Russ. He was busy doing studio work in LA and most of the recording was done in New York. I hoped to visit NZ and meet him but never got around to it.

Mike: I lived in NZ for a while and became friends with Russ and Gina and in 1973 they took me down to Auckland when , ‘Wild Bill’ Davison and Bobby Hackett did a Louis Armstrong Memorial Concert tour. Russ knew them well so we met them all backstage at the end of the show.

Errol: I did that tour with them in Australia.

Mike: Tell us about when you returned to Australia?

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Errol: When Jack and I were in New York we visited the ABC’s offices in Rockefeller Centre on Fifth Ave and the woman in charge there asked us if we would like to do a tour of Australia which we were glad to do as we hadn’t seen Australia for several years, we were all pretty homesick. So we took the tour. My wife and I had started a family and had our first son so I thought I should get off ‘the road’. I gave notice to the group at our last gig which was four weeks at The Roundtable in New York. The group had three months notice to find someone else – I suggested Don Burrows who could have played bass clarinet to replace the bassoon. However we came to Australia and the group broke up after the Australian tour. Dick Healey and Ed Gaston met Australian girls, got married and decided to stay in Australia.

The AJQ as it was when it returned to Australia in 1958. Bryce Rohde in front, then clockwise from left, Ed Gaston, Errol Buddle, Dick Healey, Jack Brokensha…

Mike: When did Ed Gaston join the group?

Errol: Several months before we came back we had a week in a club in St Louis and our bassist Jimmy Gannon had got a job with Woody Herman. Ed Gaston sat-in with the band that night and we offered him the job which changed his life. We came back to Australia by ship over three weeks and did our first concert in the Sydney Town Hall on November 1st, 1958. We went on to do concerts in all the major cities on the east coast and Adelaide and I decided to stay in Australia as after four years on the

42 road living out of suitcases you start to think ‘wouldn’t it be nice to grow some flowers and vegetables in a backyard?’

Mike: And your wife would have liked that idea too?

Errol: Yes, she was a Detroit girl but she didn’t object to coming out and enjoyed living in Australia. After the tour we settled down and I started getting casual work and I got a job with Bob Gibson’s band who were doing a regular weekly radio show – big orchestra with strings. Bob told me there was a vacancy coming up as one of the sax players was leaving for Melbourne. He said there is an opening if you want it on tenor but we need you to play oboe which I had never done. I asked when do I start and he said, two weeks. Sitting beside me in the band was Neville Thomas - a multi- instrumentalist and he offered to lend me his oboe. So I took it home and he told me where to buy some reeds. I did some practice and played the show and that’s how I came to play oboe.

Mike: Do you still do those doubles now?

Errol: No, most of the doubles now are on flute and piccolo, I don’t do much on the double reeds now, just occasionally.

Mike: Do you make your own double reeds like most of the professional oboists?

Errol: I do sometimes. I learnt from the oboe player Mr Schoenberg on a subsequent visit to America. He worked for Disney Studios in Hollywood – he played on the film soundtrack of Fantasia, a beautiful player. And when I came back to Australia after having lessons from him I had three or four reeds that he’d shown me how to make. They weren’t quite finished but they were good enough to use and I had a concert in the Opera House with a few oboe solos, so in the first half of the concert I used one of these reeds and one of the violinists remarked on the sound – the secret was in the reed, the type and quality of the cane and of course the ‘scrape’, the way it is shaped. However after interval I brushed the reed against my sleeve and broke it and I had to put one of my own reeds on. After the concert my 12-year-old son Perry, who was at the concert asked ‘what happened to your oboe in the second half?’ He could tell the difference in the sound.

Mike: A good reed is magic isn’t it – on anything!

Errol: Especially on oboe. We almost lived at the Opera House, we were backing everyone that came in such as Sammy Davis, Roy Orbison and Andy Williams. However one concert featured Carol Burnett and a few of her colleagues and she had a comedy sketch to do of Swan Lake. She came out in a ballet tutu and I had to play the opening oboe solo which is all right, it is not difficult. I had just been playing tenor and I had less than ten seconds to change to oboe and I didn’t realise that with the air conditioning the reed had dried out and when I picked up the oboe it wouldn’t play – and this is recording a ‘live’ TV show for release in the States – I squeaked and squawked for the first four bars or so –the audience may have thought it was

43 intentional as it was a comedy routine after all. Maybe they dubbed in another oboe player back in the States. In Jan 1980 we played a command performance at the Opera House for Queen Elizabeth and later Princess Margaret. We also played for Prince Charles and Princess Diana at the Wentworth Hotel in Feb 1992.

Mike: Did you have any other mishaps over the years?

Errol: We accompanied Sammy Davis Jnr at the Adelaide Hilton and in the verse of the song The Lady Is A Tramp the band stops and I had to do a flute cadenza with a long run from top to bottom and I played it right every time except this one night - I fluffed it somehow! Sammy stopped singing and turned round and gave me a ‘look’ – it was all ‘good showbiz’ of course and he made a joke out of it. I did work a lot with Sammy actually over the years.

Sammy Davis Jr: Errol worked a lot with him over the years…PHOTO © RON FALSON ARCHIVE

Mike: I found the audio [no video] clip of this song on the web - check out the ‘Live in Australia 1977’ YouTube clip of Sammy singing The Lady Is A Tramp, the arrangement by George Rhodes is an absolute gassa!! You will hear Errol playing the part perfectly. Errol, Sammy would have been a great bloke I would think?

Errol: I reckon he was the most enjoyable entertainer I’ve ever worked with. On these concert tours of Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane the thing that kept us on our toes was we never knew what tune he was going to do next – he would say “OK let’s do such and such” and we’d have to quickly find the part.

Mike: How did this actually happen on the concert?

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Errol: We would have about 25 charts in order for each concert of about 50 charts altogether – and he would just decide to skip the next one and tell us what tune he wanted and we would scramble amongst the parts to find the tune he wanted to do next – he was a very spontaneous entertainer.

Mike: Digressing for a moment, do you have any tricks for changing from clarinet to flute or the other doubles?

Errol: Just relax and try not to get up-tight. With oboe it depends very much on the reed and it is also a bit finicky to play anyway. The oboe is very delicate whereas on flute it all depends on your lips like a trumpet player. When I first started doubling on TV shows like the Sound Of Music it used to make me very nervous, changing all the time, but I got used to it after a while. We were working about 40 to 50 hours a week in the studios in those days so you get used to it. A few years ago I roughly estimated how many sessions I had done and it is about 3,000 TV shows in the various studio orchestras and about the same number of recording sessions including commercials, backgrounds for documentaries and movies. A few of the Australian movies were Age Of Consent, It Takes All Kinds, Between Wars and Caddie. I also played on the sound track they recorded here in Sydney of The Quiet American with Michael Caine for a couple of scenes, one on tenor the other on clarinet. I have also

The film composer Sven Libaek (left) in the studio with unidentified colleague… done occasional film music with Sven Libaek too, including background music for a recent Swedish film Writers Block. We did quite a lot of concerts with Sven around the late 70 and 80s with a big orchestra with strings and one year he flew the whole orchestra down to Melbourne for a Moomba concert in the Myer Music Bowl. It was a wonderful experience too when Henry Mancini came out to do concerts with a big orchestra with strings and we did concerts in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. That’s how I came to take up piccolo as one of the tunes, Baby Elephant Walk was scored with five piccolos.

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Mike: Because that was his thing wasn’t it – a variety of tonal colours with woodwinds?

Errol: The other guys in the sax section already had piccolos and it is the same reason I took up flute too – I wasn’t getting so many studio sessions and as most sessions use flutes I had to buy a flute and now because of this one tune I had to buy a piccolo. When we got to Adelaide on this tour my father and I tried to get in touch with each other without success but Dad found out where Mancini was staying and rang him, asking “do you know where Errol is staying”? Mancini told him the hotel I was staying at. Then a couple of days later we started a concert in Perth in the Subiaco Oval with a ‘flag-waver’ and halfway through the tune Henry came over to me and called out “did you see your father in Adelaide”?

Henry Mancini: did you see your father in Adelaide?... PHOTO COURTESY PINTEREST

From 1958 up to now I have done lots of work in a number of studios in Sydney, such as EMI, United Sound, Madrigal, Alberts [the publishing Co], Artransa, soundtracks for movies, documentaries etc, in which I played most of the woodwinds. I n fact on 19th Oct 1959 we did an ad at Artransa for the Mortein company with “Louis the Fly”. Bob Gibson wrote the music and I played bassoon on it. I remember this date as my second son was born on that day. I also did a few albums and documentaries with John Sangster including a 10-episode one on India. Another one was of the Great Barrier Reef. John liked to use the first take where possible, he didn’t like to do it again. At one session we did a track and I told John I had played a wrong note in one

46 spot – he said “oh, it sounded better than the one I wrote”, he just didn’t want to do it again.

Mike: On these documentaries how much did John write out and how much was left to you all to ad-lib on?

Errol: About 9/10ths was written out.

Mike: You would have done a lot of work with Don Burrows over the years?

Errol: From 1958 to the 80s Don and I did an immense amount of work together in sessions and TV shows. He on alto sax, clarinet, flute and alto flute and myself on tenor sax, bassoon, oboe and flute. We just complimented each other. Often I would play as many as five instruments on a session. Don is such a meticulous player and a good guy to be with. I played on the Bryan Davies TV show with Don’s Sextet - Jack Grimsley or John Bamford on trombone, Judy Bailey piano, George Thompson bass, George Golla guitar, John Sangster drums and vibes – it was a great group and we only made one album with the group that was titled On Camera. Playing with Don has been some of the most enjoyable times I’ve had in music. We also played on

Brian Henderson’s Bandstand TV show backing the singers such as Olivia Newton- John, Peter Allen, the Bee Gees, Frank Ifield, Col Joye, Helen Reddy and Little Pattie [have a look at the YouTube clip of Sunshine and Lollipops to see a “tenor player” miming Errol with his hands the wrong way about – Ed.]. The musical director was Bob “Beetles” Young and the musicians were Don and me, George Golla or John Edgecombe on guitar, drums and George Thompson bass – we were never ‘on screen’ but were set-up in a corner of the studio. Some of the band-tracks and vocal performances were prerecorded. However after a while we were fired as they wanted a younger band – our average age was 32! But after two weeks they said “could you please come back”? It seems the younger band couldn’t read too well and took two hours or more to record a track where we would do it in 20 minutes or so. In 1974 we formed a group with Col Nolan - the Nolan Buddle Quintet - and we had a

47 four-night a week job playing nothing but jazz for about four years down at the Old Push - that was a great gig - in fact one night Bud Freeman came in with his tenor under his arm and the first thing he said was “what a great atmosphere” and he’s played in a few clubs! The personnel of the quartet was Laurie Bennett or Warren Daly on drums, Dieter Vogt on bass or sometimes Ed Gaston – it was a great little club with a tremendous atmosphere. Warren Daly was on drums with us for a while

The Nolan-Buddle Quartet: Errol (far left) performing with (L-R), Laurie Bennett (drums), Dieter Vogt (bass) and Col Nolan (piano)… PHOTO CREDIT NORM LINEHAN at The Push and one night he said “would you like to do a tour of Russia with my big band? We are leaving next Sunday”. He had a concert tour of Russia coming up with the Daly-Wilson Big Band and afterwards would go on to London to play at Ronnie Scott’s and they wanted a tenor soloist. Leaving next Sunday meant I only had five days to get a Russian visa from Canberra and what with playing four nights a week and other work I didn’t have time to pay my bills so I took my cheque book with me to Russia and mailed them from Moscow! I also tried to telephone my father from there without success so I wrote to him and he got a bit of a shock to hear I was in Russia.

Mike: What year was this?

Errol: 1975. The Russian tour was over 25 concerts which were packed out. However at our opening concert in Lithuania I had a mouthpiece stolen. The band was much louder than I expected and my Otto Link mouthpiece wasn’t strong enough so I decided at interval to use my Berg Larsen that would give me more volume, but it was gone. It could have been stolen by a local sax player who was wandering around backstage. The Berg Larsen was a tremendous mouthpiece – you can’t buy them as good as that now. On the way to London we were told that the booking at Ronnie

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Drummer Warren Daly: would you like to do a tour of Russia with my big band? We are leaving next Sunday…

Scott’s had been cancelled and Count Basie had been booked instead so in this five- day period I went over to Paris to see if I could buy a new oboe. From London we went to Las Vegas and played for a week at the Hilton International starting at midnight each night. Later we played at Donte’s in North Hollywood with and Frank Rosolino in the audience – Frank stayed the whole night standing at the bar just listening to the band! Warren reckons the band made a tremendous impact on them – well it was different and the trombone section was good. We had some very good players and we’d just finished a whole tour of 26 concerts. I told Don Menza how I had my mouthpiece stolen out of my case, he said “you mean to tell me the Russians steal”? Don went home for a while and on return he gave me another Berg Larsen mouthpiece to replace it.

Mike: That was very good of him.

Errol: Yes very nice of him. I’ve been back to the States about four times since and on one visit in 2009 I did a recording session at Paramount Studios on bassoon for Star Trek – Deep Space 9. It was very moody music with a lot of sustained notes. Not technically difficult but intonation and tone had to be spot on. There were three woodwinds, trumpet, half a dozen French horns and a big string section and I got $700 for the session – good money for those days. We got there about 1:15 and at about 5 to 2 the conductor walked in. He had a TV monitor beside him playing the movie with cues for the music. We started pretty much right on 2pm with a – there was no trying to get a balance. All the mics were pre-set by the sound engineers and sometimes they accepted the first take. I also played lead alto with a couple of big bands and was tenor soloist with the Pat Longo orchestra with Frank Sinatra Jnr singing.

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Mike: Can you tell us about some of the musicians that have impressed you in Los Angeles?

Errol: Fortunately there is still a fairly good music scene going on in LA both in studios and clubs. One of my favourite tenor players is Pete Christlieb. He has a beautiful sound with technique to burn with a groovy style. He is regarded as the best jazz tenor player in LA. He is not so well-known here or even in the US but he did

US saxophonist Pete Christlieb: regarded as the best jazz tenor player in LA….

some tracks on a album and he did the solos on Unforgettable and That Sunday for the Unforgettable album. Pete’s father Don was the main bassoon player in LA and a close friend of Stravinsky who used to hold Pete on his knee as a young lad. I had to ring Don to get Pete’s number once and I said that I think Pete is the best living tenor player and Don said ‘we think so too’. [Pete’s website is – http://www.petechristlieb.com – Ed]. The reason he is not so well- known is because he is so busy in the studios earning very good money – he still does an occasional jazz club gig. I also got to know Gene Cipriano in Hollywood – he was on the Star Trek session. He has been the number one session oboe player for a long time. He plays all the doubles I play except the bassoon. He was interviewed in Downbeat one time and was asked did he find doubling hard and he said “no, it just comes naturally to me. I don’t do much practice but I’ve gotta make reeds”. He is on hundreds of movies and quite a good jazz player. He sent me a copy of his first solo CD he released about three years ago playing tenor and clarinet. He is a real musician though - for instance, I wrote to him one time and asked him if he could send me a list of some of the movies he played on. He replied asking how can he do this? I replied saying he could fax it from Kinko’s [now known as FedEx Office Print & Ship

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Services, Inc. - Ed. ] he then said, who are they? He eventually sent me a handwritten letter with the list of many of the movies he had played on. He is still playing at around 86 years old and is still the best studio oboe player in LA. He was on a lot of the old movie classics, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Ten Commandments etc. The people on those sessions are just the best available.

Mike: Is this around the time you recorded the theme from Picnic At Hanging Rock that became such a hit in 1976?

Errol: Yes, exactly then.

Mike: Did you do it on the pan pipe?

Errol: No, it was on tenor recorder. Channel 7 Records asked Col Nolan and myself to go and see the film Picnic At Hanging Rock to see if there was anything we could get out of the music that we could make a recording of. Col and I went to the Chatswood cinema matinee but thought the music was really disjointed with all kinds of time signatures so we couldn’t make much out of it. The company then gave me a recording of Gheorghe Zamfir playing mostly folk songs on the Pan Pipe some of which were used on the film soundtrack. I thought maybe we could do something with one tune if I changed a few bars and put it into straight 4/4 time. We recorded this and it was released on a 45 single. I happened to hear John Laws play it one day on the radio for the first time and he said “this is going to be a hit, I’ll play it again” and sure enough it did become a hit and went up to number two in the ‘top forty’. It was the highest an Australian instrumental ever got on the top forty.

Mike: To quote Col Nolan from John Sharpe’s book I Wanted To Be A Jazz Musician, quote – “God, we went everywhere on that thing. Then Errol went overseas suddenly and Bob Bertles came into the band. We had so much work on the

51 strength of that record. It used to be so funny because we got all these gigs at shopping centres and God knows what. And the people would say, “hey that’s the band that does Picnic At Hanging Rock”. We’d play it and it would kill them, they loved it” – unquote. [There is a YouTube clip of the recording at -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeNUwelGgco Ed.]

Errol: The company then asked me to make a whole album on recorder - this was called Recorder Magic.

Mike: So this album was with Col Nolan too?

Errol: No, we had split up by then – this was with a group I got together just for this album but the Hanging Rock theme track on this recording was with Col. One of the tracks was a sort of ‘funky’ version of Chariots Of Fire - so that was our attempt at the commercial market. I led a quartet in September 1982 on a six-week concert tour of SE Asia for the Department of Foreign Affairs including Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Rangoon, Manila, North Borneo and Penang. The quartet had Len Barnard on drums, Phil Scorgie bass and Mark Isaacs on piano. We were picked up by the Australian Consulate people at each city and driven to five-star hotels. The first city we visited was Singapore and on checking in to the hotel at around 9:30am Len said let’s put our stuff in our rooms and we’ll meet down here for a drink – Phil said “no I don’t feel like it” and Mark said “it’s a bit early for me” and I said it’s too early for me too. Len said – “do you mean to tell me I’ve got to spend six weeks with you bunch of poofters“? None of us drank that much in those days – we drank more coffee than anything. I did get trapped sometimes by Sangster though. When we got to Bangkok it was stipulated we had to play two or three of the King of Thailand’s tunes. The King played sax and ran a big band and wrote tunes with titles like Midnight Over

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The quartet which the Department of Foreign Affairs toured for six weeks in Asia in 1982: L-R, Mark Isaacs, Errol Buddle, Len Barnard, Phil Scorgie…PHOTO COURTESY MUSICA VIVA AUSTRALIA

The River, Evening At Sunset, Rain In August – tunes like that, with nature-like titles. Unfortunately he could not attend the concert as he was very ill. In November 1984 I did a one-night concert at Sammy Lee’s old club The Latin Quarter in Pitt St, Sydney with Sonny Stitt, Richie Cole and Bernie McGann – like a ‘saxophone summit’ and it was recorded. Sonny Stitt knocked me out, he was one of my favourite tenor players. However a week or two later we heard that the recording had been ‘lost’. I don’t know if I believe that, as in all my time in studios I know that occasionally recording engineers get ‘bad balances’, such as too much or too little of one instrument or another and in a ‘live’ situation it is very difficult to get a good balance. So maybe the quality was not good enough and they decided not to release it, which is a pity as it would have been Sonny Stitt’s last recording.

Mike: Now how did you come to do the Best of Buddles Doubles album?

Errol: All the “doubling” tracks were ‘multi-dubbed’ by the sound engineers at EMI plus some other tunes from other recordings.

Mike: How many of these horns did you own?

Errol: All of them except the baritone – I played them mainly out of necessity. If I had a job offer on flute, I had to buy a flute. I was offered a job on lead alto in a band out at Hurstville so I had to buy an alto. It was a tremendous ‘workout’ with mainly studio musicians every Saturday night for ten years. That’s where I learnt to play lead alto. I like playing lead and I’ve done quite a lot of listening and studying of good lead players both on record and live in the US.

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Cover of the famous Buddles Doubles album…

Mike: You were playing Selmer Mark 6 saxes then?

Errol: Yes but after some years of intense playing the keywork was going out of adjustment too easily and I could not find good Mk 6s to replace them so I have been playing Cannonball ‘Big Bell Stone’ soprano, alto and tenor saxes for the last seven years. However I am now playing John Lehner “Super 6 Bird series” alto and tenor saxes which are excellent.

Mike: Could you tell us about your other horns?

Errol: I have a Buffet R13 clarinet and a Selmer bass clarinet, a Brannen-Cooper concert flute and a Brannen wooden piccolo and a Sankyo Prima alto flute and an Artley Ogilvie bass flute, a Lorèe oboe and cor anglais and a Heckel bassoon.

Mike: And you still have them all home?

Errol: Yes.

Mike: And what mouthpieces do you use?

Errol: On alto I use a ‘New York’ Meyer 6 and occasionally if I need a brighter sound I use a Claude Lakey. On tenor an old Berg Larsen 120 over O model.

Mike: And reeds?

Errol: At the moment regular Ricos as I have half an old tea chest of 20-year-old reeds and they are still really good, although some of the new ones are OK too – the

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Rico ‘Jazz Select’ are also good and I use mostly Van Doren on clarinet. When a more ‘French’ sound is required I use classic Van Dorens on saxes.

Mike: Do you have an opinion on ligatures? There are all sorts of expensive fancy ones out there now.

Errol: To tell you the truth I haven’t noticed that much difference when I change over – maybe it has to do with how tight you turn the screws? I use a ‘regular’ ligature on the soprano and alto but on tenor I have a Rovner ligature.

Mike: You spoke of James Galway visiting Soup Plus restaurant a couple of times where you were playing and I would like to add a quote about you from the book Flute written by James on doubling, page 212 in the Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides series - “Once when I was in Sydney, Australia, I went to a jazz club and heard a guy play in turn saxophone, flute, bassoon and piccolo. He was a master of all. Very rarely does one hear any individual one of these instruments played as well as he played all four. But he was somewhat above average. Such versatility is luckily not usually demanded, but proficiency on at least two instruments makes for a good living in studio work.”

The Irish flautist James Galway: he heard Errol Buddle in Soup Plus and later wrote, ‘I went to a jazz club and heard a guy play in turn saxophone, flute, bassoon and piccolo. He was a master of all…’

Mike: Of all the instruments you play, do you have a favourite?

Errol: I like them all but I’ve always tended towards tenor with alto a close second; but one of the most satisfying to play is the flute because you make the sound yourself, you don’t have to depend on a reed.

Mike: Are you still practicing?

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Newspaper advertisements for the Australian Jazz Quartet’s club engagements in the United States, circa 1955…

More newspaper advertisements for the AJQ’s performances. Note that the AJQ is billed above Trio and featuring Art Blakey and Horace Silver...

Errol: Oh if I have something coming up I check that the instruments and reeds are working and sometimes do some preparation depending on the gig – it’s like when you learn how to ride a bike.

Mike: And now in recent years you live in Sydney, still playing in Festivals and casual gigs?

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Errol: Yes, playing in a variety of clubs, concerts and festivals such as Manly, Thredbo, Wangaratta, Wollongong and Magnetic Island. Our group now usually has Maree Steinway on keyboard and vocals with various bass players such as 19y/o Noel Mason, Brendan Clark or Eric Ajaye [from Canberra] and drummers such as Bob Baird, Toby Hall or Tim Firth etc. Sometimes we enlarge to a quintet with Ed Wilson on trombone and bass trumpet. We’ve done a few things together over the last six months.

Mike: Have any of your children taken up music?

Errol: Only my eldest son Lee, who lives in Perth. Lee runs Crank Recording [formerly Sound Mine] one of the best recording studios in Perth and plays saxes. He is very active in the Perth scene. Perry the middle son lives in Albany WA and the third son Jay died when he was 21.

Errol’s son Lee Buddle, who is a saxophonist and runs Crank Recording, one of the best recording studios in Perth…

Mike: I guess that is about it Errol, thank you again for your generosity in giving us so much of your time.

Errol: I’d like to get down to Melbourne some time, I love Melbourne, there’s a really nice atmosphere down there. Some of my most enjoyable years were in Melbourne.

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AJQ DISCOGRAPHY:

LPs

Australian Jazz Quartet (Bethlehem BCP-1031, 1955)

The Australian Jazz Quartet (Bethlehem BCP-6003, 1955)

Australian Jazz Quartet/Quintet (Bethlehem BCP-6002, 1956)

The Australian Jazz Quintet: at the Varsity Drag (Bethlehem BCP-6012, 1956)

Australian Jazz Quintet Plus One: Jazz in D Minor (Bethlehem BCP-6015, 1957)

Rodgers & Hammerstein (Bethlehem BCP-6022, 1957)

Free Style (Bethlehem BCP-6029, 1958)

Three Penny Opera (Bethlehem BCP-6030, 1958)

CDs

The Australian Jazz Quintet Plus One: Reunion (AEM Record Group, AEM 25801-2, Farmington Hills, Michigan, 1994)

The Australian Jazz Quintet: at the Varsity Drag (Bethlehem BCP-6012 reissued, Avenue Jazz, R2 75911, Los Angeles, 2000)

Australian Jazz Quartet (Bethlehem BCP-6003 reissued, TOCJ-62097, Japan, 2001)

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